AMD's upcoming Carrizo APU might not make it to the desktop market at all.

According to Italian tech site bitsandchips.it, citing industry sources, AMD plans to limit Carrizo to mobile parts. Furthermore the source claims Carrizo will not support DDR4 memory. We cannot confirm or deny the report at this time.

If the rumours turn out to be true, AMD will not have a new desktop platform next year. Bear in mind that Intel is doing the exact same thing by bringing 14nm silicon to mobile rather than desktop. AMD's roadmap previously pointed to a desktop Carrizo launch in 2015.

AMD's FM2+ socket and Kaveri derivatives would have to hold the line until 2016. The same goes for the AM3+ platform, which should also last until 2016.

AMD is serious about getting into tablets and thin and light notebooks. The launch of Beema and Mullins APUs is just an example that things are getting better and we expect to see some Beema designs at Computex 2014, in the first week of June.

Beema replaces Kabini and it comes with four Puma plus cores, next generation Radeon graphics and supports HSA. The decision to include HSA support is a big deal, as getting a compute component in this market has potential. Inexpensive tablets and notebooks with additional parallel capabilities could be a sales booster for AMD.

Building on low-end APU success

AMD has been doing well in this market for the past couple of years and we hope Beema will be yet another successful product. AMD has some key players on its side, such as HP, Lenovo and Dell. These companies traditionally had a lot of AMD design wins in the entry level market.

Beema’s replacement comes in 2015 and the chip, codenamed Nolan, is the company’s first 20nm APU. The chip has a new core based and it will use the new 20nm manufacturing process. It will use the same socket as Beema and relies on FT3 BGA packaging and socket. We expect that connected standby gets even better with Nolan and Beema is the first AMD platform to bring this nice feature to the tablet and essential market.

Going down to 20nm from 28nm you can expect that the chip will be able to give you more performance with less power, idle power will go down, battery life will increase. First we need to see what can AMD do with Beema as the A6 6310, A4 6210 and E2 6110 could do well in 15W TDP mainstream notebooks, while the E1 6010 dual-core clocked at 1.35GHz will fit nicely in some sub-10W TDP notebooks, or hybrids. However, it's not just the transition to 20nm. AMD made some impressive tweaks to Beema and Mullins, significantly cutting power consumption on the 28nm node. These lessons will be applied to 20nm products.

Competitive tablet parts but...

AMD has three more tablet chips. A10 Micro 6700T and A4 Micro 6400T are both quad-cores clocked at 1.2GHz and 1.0GHz respectively and have 2MB cache, Radeon R6 and R3 graphics and both have a 4.5W TDP. AMD claims that they operate under 2.8 W SPD (standard design power) and that this should be an average consumption for most of the tasks. A10 Micro 6700T maximum turbo frequency goes as high as 2.2 GHz while A4 Micro 6400T stops at 1.6GHz. The last of the tablet chips is dual core E1 Micro 6200T clocked at 1GHz with max turbo clock of 1.4GHz, 1MB cache, Radeon R2 graphics clocked at 300W. The chip has a 3.95W TDP and the same 2.8W SDP as its more powerful siblings.

It remains to be seen if the gaming tablet strategy will work out well, but reference tablet we saw on Mobile World Congress 2014 looks quite promising. With Beema AMD can offer Intel’s Bay Trail customers a healthy alternative probably at the same price if not a bit more affordable. With 20nm Nolan, if all goes well, things might look even better. However, Intel's contra-revenue programme has tilted the table and AMD simply cannot afford to burn money on subisidies.

AMD roadmaps are usually a mixed bag for enthusiasts. They shed more light on upcoming products, but more often than not they also reveal new delays. The last one, unearthed by Digitimes, is no exception.

Desktop Kabini has been pushed back, along with its successor Beema. We’ve heard rumours of the delay, but now they are all but official. Desktop Kabini parts were originally expected to launch later this year, but they’ve been pushed back to late Q1 2014. They will enter production in February and launch in March 2014. This particular batch includes a few interesting products that were supposed to move up the ladder, from the low end to the mid range. The A4-5350 and A4-5150 are quad cores, d there’s a dual core – the E1-2650. All have a 25W TDP.

In addition, Beema has also been rescheduled. It was originally supposed to launch in mid-2014, but now the launch window is the second half of 2014, or early 2015.

Kaveri is coming out in Q1 2014, no surprises there. The delay was already obvious. Desktop Carrizo is supposed to launch in 2015, along with Nolan, which should replace Beema.